Dan Winslow: “My heart goes out to all those injured at today’s Boston Marathon. My prayers will be with all those affected by this tragedy. I have ordered my campaign to suspend all activities until further notice.”

Stephen Lynch: “I am terribly saddened by today’s news. Right now we need to let the trained emergency personnel do their jobs to ensure that there are no other threats, and that we can get a better sense of what happened. No matter who or what is responsible, this is a terrible tragedy for our city and our nation. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have been injured today.”

Mike Sullivan: “Our hearts and prayers are with those injured in today’s horrific explosion during the Boston Marathon and the families of all concerned. I am confident in the combined efforts of the FBI, Boston Police Department, State Police and ATF, in their investigation into these explosions, that sadly have occurred on Patriot’s Day–a day with much local and national symbolism. While the causes of these explosions have not yet been determined, if not accidental, I know these agencies and others will identify those responsible for these horrific and cowardly acts of violence and hold them accountable to the fullest extent of the law. May we together as citizens of the Commonwealth and across this nation pray for all effected by this terrible event.”

Gabriel Gomez who ran the Boston Marathon today:

Thoughts and prayers to all the runners, families and spectators at the Marathon today – keep safe and keep those hurt in your prayers.

Gomez has placed $233,000 of television ads and hopes to add another $100K in the next two weeks. The Gomez camp thinks “Gabriel is in great position to win this thing, if he survives the Boston Marathon on Monday.”

Not exactly prime time. Nothing new from Markey, but I’m told he’ll be live in-studio tonight at 10PM on Dan Rea, WBZ-Radio 1030.

Odd timing? After I posted this GOTV piece in the morning, Sullivan announced by lunchtime that he added Desiree Awiszio as his campaign’s Deputy Campaign Manager for Field Operations. Recently, Awiszio served as Deputy Campaign Manager for Marty Lamb for Congress.

While high profile debates and low flying bi-planes grab our attention, the fate of each US Senate campaign now rests in a little known and rarely covered realm of politics, get out the vote or GOTV.

Getting out your vote, starts first with identifying your vote, a process that can easily take several weeks for a special election and in a regularly scheduled election it takes months of preparation and grunt work leading up to the big day.

So it was ominous sign for the Gomez camp Wednesday when a staffer sent out an email declaring that they had “just got in our first batch of phones and are looking to fill some call shifts…As you can imagine, in this shortened primary season, it is even more important to get calls done and ID voters to come out and vote for Gabriel.”

Campaigns often ignore GOTV tasks for more glorious pursuits that staffers [and reporters] no doubt find more intellectually stimulating, glamorous or just plain easier. Hard to see the fun in door knocking on a cold damp March day.

If they’ve been working the phones and doors, as Scott Brown did in 2010, camps should have identified by now a core base of voters highly committed to their candidate on April 30th.

Markey Press Secretary, Andrew Zucker, says the camp has “built the strongest grassroots operation in this state, recruiting more than 5,000 volunteers who have held more than 2,000 voter contact events.”

In a low turnout special election every volunteer hour wasted holding signs is an hour not spent on direct voter contact. Stand outs have a low rate of return, when the special election audience is so small.

On the GOP side, with even a smaller voter pool the race is tougher to read than a Nantucket fog, but one thing is clear the Winslow camp, like Markey, has invested significant resources on GOTV having knocked 6,000 doors and connected 50,000 calls to likely GOP voters.

According to Winslow Communications Director Charlie Pearce, Winslow is the only candidate “in the GOP primary to make a significant investment in a solid ground game. In a campaign that is likely to have only around 200,000 voters this is going to matter. By Election Day we will have personally contacted every likely voter in this state. That will be the difference in our margin of victory.”

Since GOP voters tend to live in suburban neighborhoods phone banking is a more practical direct voter contact tool.

And while the Gomez camp is just now installing phones to conduct voter identification, Alicia Preston of the Sullivan camp said they’ve “knocked on thousands of doors, made thousands of calls, and are very excited with the response we have received.”

In a letter to WCVB Friday, the Lynch camp ended its advertising boycott of the popular TV station but reserved the right to renew the boycott if in the “near future” the company is “not negotiating in good faith.”

IBEW 1228 issued a statement late Monday supporting the Lynch position. The station and the union plan negotiation sessions April 5 and 10.

IBEW 1228 claimed that Tom Steyer’s media buy in favor of Congressman Markey was the main reason why the union encouraged Lynch to buy time on WCVB.

Aside from the standard “my guy is right, your guy is wrong” tweets both the Markey and Lynch camps took additional steps to fact check the other prior to and during the debate last night.

Markey made the most impressive effort with separate “fact check” releases on issues ranging from economy, the VA, healthcare and the Keystone Pipeline. It was almost as if they divided their entire debate prep book into nine separate press releases. Some of the posts were so detailed, it could make opposition research all the more easier. Maybe too detailed, as it appears the Markey camp deleted most of those posts by this morning.

@andrewzucker did u delete some/most of the Fact Check posts you put up on your website yesterday?

Meanwhile, Conor Yunits of the Lynch camp launched a special twitter account @MASENFactCheck which also had some reporters questioning it.

The neither the bio of @MASENFactCheck or the 28 tweet timeline makes mention of the Lynch campaign connection: “Follow for #masen fact checks on all candidates in the 2013 Special Senate Primary & General Election” A voter reading just the timeline or bio of @MASENFactCheck would have no way of knowing the information was coming from the Lynch camp.

According to The Hill this is Steyer’s attack ad against Lynch, the video was uploaded Thursday, despite Steyer’s the high noon deadline Friday. Video does not have an audio track, it is intended to be run on the side of trucks as roving billboards.